


everything whose beauty does not die

by miles_and_miles



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, M/M, Non-Explicit Sex, Power Dynamics, References to Oscar Wilde, Shipping It For The Bit, anything can be a power play if you love causing problems on purpose!, author just wanted to write flowery prose, people who haven't figured out that the objective of sex isn't necessarily victory, semi-romantic villainy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2020-11-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:54:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27641024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miles_and_miles/pseuds/miles_and_miles
Summary: as a certain poet once said, "the only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it."
Relationships: Elias Bouchard/Peter Lukas
Comments: 13
Kudos: 64





	everything whose beauty does not die

It’s nothing consequential, just a name, just a number, just a document he has to pull up again to recall a detail. But Elias doesn’t forget things _—_ it just doesn’t happen. 

Something has changed. A sudden imbalance of powers, a paradigm shift like a subtle turn in the weather, a draft in his office where there certainly hadn’t been one before, his thoughts blurring around the edges as if seen through a thick fog _—_

“Peter, we’ve been over this. You can’t sneak up on me. It’s literally not possible,” he says aloud, standing up. “What do you want?”

“Can’t I come by to see an old friend?” 

The chill in Elias’s office solidifies into a person _—_ at first a silhouette, then a corporeal figure standing on the other side of his desk. Peter never really changes _—_ it’s always the woolen overcoat too heavy for the weather, the sweaters that could’ve walked out of the nineteen-fifties, the unkempt greying hair, his face all weathered edges and craggy angles; exactly the sort of person one would expect to see keeping a lighthouse in the middle of absolutely nowhere. 

“I’m not your friend,” Elias says idly, not pretending not to stare. He’s rewarded with a half-smirk, a rare thing, something it’s taken him years to earn. He pretends he doesn’t care. 

It’s been a long time; several months, nearly a year. Time passes differently for Elias than it does for most people, but he still notices when Peter leaves on voyages and doesn’t come back for weeks and weeks on end. Not that he minds. 

Well. Maybe he minds a little, but he’ll never admit it. Not in a million years _—_ or, rather, not in as many years as he can manage to stay alive. 

“So. You need money to keep this place running,” Peter says brusquely. 

“I don’t _need_ anything from you.” 

“Good to know you’re ready to start applying for grants to keep this place running without my family’s money.” The cheer in Peter’s voice makes Elias want to pitch a harpsichord out a window. “I’m sure the government will think your work here is very important.” 

“Hm,” Elias intones, reticent. He can’t stand being out-argued, even if it’s just a game, even if it’s just the opening salvos of a worn old bickering match, so he lets the corner of his mouth curl into a smirk. He’s never played fair a day in his life, and now doesn’t seem to be the moment to start. “I have other benefactors, you know.” 

“Do you?” 

“Mm-hm,” he says, and because he’s not above it, he spends a lingering moment uncapping one of his fountain pens with his teeth so he can make some inconsequential note, holding it in his mouth for longer than necessary, hell’s own oral fixation given breath and form. He lowers it slowly from his lips and looks up slyly with his eyes half-lidded, just so it can be a little bit more of a twist of the knife when he says, “I don’t need you. I don’t even want you.” 

“Still not above all the...coquettery,” notes Peter, always one to point out the obvious. 

“‘Coquettery.’ Where’d you learn that, some Regency morality guide?” Elias asks, stepping lightly around the desk, buttoning his suit jacket primly as he does so. “Don’t waste your breath. I’ve read them all.” 

Peter actually chuckles at this. “I know,” he says, and Elias gets the sense that he’s not looking _into_ his eyes so much as _at_ them, his expression somewhere between curious and disapproving. Looking for signs of age, maybe; signs that those irises used to be a true, bright blue before they faded into the eerie near-silver they are now. 

“See something you like?” says Elias, sweet as cough syrup and dangerous as a loaded gun, raising dark eyebrows, issuing a challenge. 

Peter reaches out and unbuttons his jacket, pulling him in by the lapels. 

It’s one of the things Elias is most fond of about this form _—_ its angularity, its utter lack of give. The grey streak in his dark hair, the one that appeared the morning, some twenty years ago, when he woke up with bloodstained clothes and unfamiliar eyes and a cruel, cosmic sense of purpose. He’s a creature of ultimatums and one-way paths, occupying a body that finally matches the way he’d prefer to conduct business _—_ every word, every gesture, every action a knife so sharp that its cut isn’t visible until there’s blood. 

It annoys him that all that sharpness disappears as he leans into Peter, his posture going concave and yielding, but sacrifices have to be made in any game of chess. Peter, meanwhile, kisses him like somebody who thinks he’s won, which simply will not do. 

“Fine,” Elias sighs into Peter’s mouth. 

“What?” 

But Elias is already untying the ratty old scarf around Peter’s neck, leaning into the crook between neck and shoulder, leaving kisses that burn and bruises that’ll embarrass Peter tomorrow. He smiles slow and wide when he feels Peter’s breath catch, makes sure that the other man feels his lips moving, feels his teeth. Feels just how easily Elias is able to read his vulnerabilities like an open book. 

It was Oscar Wilde, Elias believes, who said _Everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about power._

And there’s nothing _—_ not prestige, not eternal youth, not any mortal soul living nor dead _—nothing_ Elias loves like power. 

“You are _insufferable_ ,” Peter says, soft and cold and cruel as his weathered hand charts a cartographer’s line from the chest of Elias’s jacket to his hip. “Greedy.” 

Elias carefully steadies his breath, strung out between desire and frustration, peeved with the easily-distracted human shell he occupies, with the instinct that tells him to lean into the touch. 

“But you don’t want anything. You don’t need anything. You’re too good for that,” Peter breathes into his ear, icy as sea fog, and Elias absolutely refuses to shiver. 

“I _am_ too good for that _..._ ” he trails off with a broken inhale as Peter’s hand traces steadily lower, over the knife’s edge of his hipbone, to the inside of his thigh. Elias composes himself quickly, cleanly, but he knows that his face is flushed, and a loose lock of greying hair is falling across his forehead. He won’t concede, though. He _doesn’t_ concede. It’s against his principles. 

_Everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about power._

He presses his slim silhouette flush against Peter’s body, pushing him back against the desk. The lamp rattles, and Elias throws out a hand to steady it before it falls while he slides a thigh between Peter’s legs, rough and demanding, smirking when he feels Peter’s hand tense, freezing in the middle of brusquely unbuttoning Elias’s collared shirt. 

“You’ve been away for too long,” Elias murmurs, turning his face away. “I’ve moved on.” 

“You never move on, you soulless old demon.” 

“Oh, but you missed me, didn’t you?” Elias says, letting his eyes catch Peter’s as he slides a hand up to take a handful of Peter’s hair, letting his mind trace the worn-down edges of memories he isn’t supposed to see. 

“Stop that,” says Peter sharply. 

“Stop what?” asks Elias coyly; not enough intention behind the question to compel an answer but just enough that he knows it’ll feel strange, unnatural, grating. 

Peter presses his lips together, an old, familiar gesture of frustration. His eyes are colder than ice, colder than space, colder than anything. 

“Tell me. You know you’re going to. _Tell me how much you—_ “ His voice catches in his throat as Peter roughly turns him by the shoulders, pushing Elias hard enough against the desk that this time the lamp _does_ fall over; distantly, Elias hears something shatter. It’s easy for him to forget that Peter is both stronger and taller; easy for Elias to get so wrapped up in his carefully-constructed world of traps and mind games to remember that wit doesn’t mean much when he's picking fights with someone who’s six foot something and actually knows how to hoist sails. The desk is half-supporting his weight now, and it’s all he can do not to full-out writhe as Peter pins both his wrists to its chestnut surface with one hand, the other wrapping around the knot of Elias’s tie. 

“Ask again. I dare you.”

“Fine.” Elias raises a defiant brow, marshals the bitter kind of concentration that comes with proving a point, watches shadows recede from the lines and hollows of Peter’s face as a harsh, incandescent luminescence flickers to life in Elias’s eyes. Down his arms, at the center of his forehead, he feels eye-shaped markings bleed into existence; scars scattered by the Watcher’s presence, things that would look like tattoos if they weren’t gilded and animate. Elias’s skin tingles, and all of his eyes open in concert before he begins again, with feeling this time. “ _Did you think of—_ ”

Before Elias can finish the command, Peter pulls him forward by the tie, halfway to cutting off his windpipe, leaning close and speaking with a deadly kind of quiet. Elias’s eyes _—_ the ones that were there all along _—_ go wide with surprise.

“Did I or did I not tell you not to compel me?” 

“I’ll always compel you,” Elias manages, giving a slight involuntary moan as slowly, slowly, Peter lets the tie go slack. Elias stares up at him, all hunger, all eyes. Peter lets his wrists go so he can otherwise occupy that particular hand by running it up the inseam of Elias’s _meticulously_ tailored trousers. Between the effort he’s spent on compulsion and the sweet, delirious ache devouring half his mind, Elias can’t do anything but fall forward into Peter’s shoulder, breathing hard and ragged. 

“Don’t you think you’d better sit down?” says Peter, and he’s so _fucking_ smug about it that Elias has half a mind to bite him, but the other half is aching and shivering and it seems that they’ve arrived at the rare moment when he genuinely can’t think straight. _Strategic recalibration_ , he tells himself. _Sometimes you’ve got to lose a battle to win the war._

Peter looks Elias directly in the eye as he sweeps well-sorted piles of papers off of the desk and onto the floor. 

“Oh, fuck you,” Elias mutters, but he shifts his weight back to sit on the desk. 

“No more questions,” Peter says, unbuckling Elias’s belt with calloused fingers. “No, look at me.” He lifts Elias’s chin, forcing him to meet his eyes. Then, from nowhere: “You know the story of Dorian Gray, I presume?” 

“Of course I _—_ who do you think I _—_ ” says Elias incomprehensibly, several sets of eyes fluttering shut as Peter unbuttons his fly, and _lord, his hands are freezing_ , and _—_

“One of Wilde’s more interesting works, don’t you think?”

“Why _—fuck—_ are we choosing this _—_ this moment for a _—_ for a discussion of _—ah—_ of Victorian literature, pray tell?” 

“Wilde had a lot to say about seeking everlasting youth and beauty,” says Peter, almost absentmindedly, one hand twined through Elias’s hair, pulling his head back while Elias’s hips grind insistently against the other. 

“So you think I’m beautiful?” Elias manages, though any intended slyness is undercut rather badly by the unevenness in his voice. 

“That’s not the point, you vain menace to society,” Peter says fondly, smiling as Elias gasps aloud and grasps at the collar of his greatcoat. “It’s never a good idea. It always comes back to bite you in the end.” 

“I _—_ ” Elias begins, but the words twist and fragment as all over his body eyes begin to flutter closed. 

“I look forward to seeing that,” Peter muses as Elias clutches fistfuls of his sweater, as he groans helplessly into Peter’s shoulder and shakes, breath catching; a lovely, corrupt thing, his eyes casting strange shadows with their glowing white light; a soul trapped in a painting, using his last bit of willpower to avoid gasping Peter’s name. “I look forward,” Peter repeats, enunciating every word, “to watching you fall.” 

Elias barely notices as Peter fades from the room, pressing a kiss onto Elias’s parted lips before vanishing into thin air without saying goodbye. 

Elias collapses back on his elbows, running a hand through his markedly disheveled hair, trying to get his breathing under control, exhausted and bruised, his shirt missing a button and his eyes still half-glowing. He sighs. 

Behind him, Jonah Magnus’s portrait keeps watching. 

**Author's Note:**

> in the words of one brian david gilbert, "and if you'll excuse me, i'm going to go throw myself into the ocean now."
> 
> quote in summary & title excerpted from "the picture of dorian gray," because it's the wee hours of the morning and if we're doing this we're gonna go the whole nine yards!
> 
> thank you to my cherished beta reader and sin enabler @key_exchange!


End file.
